Orrin Hatch announces retirement from Senate

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT)

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee and all-around sanctimonious scold and partisan hack, will not run for re-election in 2018. He made the announcement in—what else?—a tweeted video. 

Mr. Hatch’s decision comes just weeks after Mr. Trump signed a sweeping tax overhaul into law, a measure that the senator helped write as chairman of the Finance Committee. The bill represented something of a capstone to Mr. Hatch’s four decades in Congress and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, even deemed it as such last month in what was seen as a subtle effort to usher his colleague to the exits.
 

Mr. Hatch, 83, was under heavy pressure from Mr. Trump to seek re-election and block Mr. Romney, who has been harshly critical of the president. But Mr. Hatch, who emerged as one of the president’s most avid loyalists in the Senate, decided to retire after discussing the matter with his family over the holidays. The veteran senator was also facing harsh poll numbers in Utah, where 75 percent of voters indicated in a survey last fall that they did not want him to run again.

The decision also comes weeks after Hatch decided to pass that tax bill rather than make sure that his brainchild, the Children's Health Insurance Program, was funded for the next five years. Which, along with his hypocritical embrace of Trump, probably has something to do with his tanking popularity back home.